1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a probe apparatus including a loader section and plural measuring sections capable of being freely combined with the loader section.
2. Prior Art
Various kinds of ICs and LSIs are produced in the semiconductors manufacturing factories, for example, to meet technical developments. The semiconductors manufacturing apparatus installed in the clean room at the semiconductors manufacturing factory is intended to meet one of the memory ICs, gate array ICs and the like manufacturing lines. In other words, the semiconductors manufacturing apparatus differs depending upon the kind of ICs produced, and the probe apparatus is also arranged in every manufacturing line. However, the production of each of the manufacturing lines often changes largely because products on one of these manufacturing lines are sometimes urgently needed, and the probe apparatus must satisfy this urgent need. The clean room is an extremely high cost arrangement. Therefore, it must be arranged so that the smallest number of the probe apparatuses are combined with one another to meet the production change without enlarging the floor area of the clean room and lowering the process capacity of the apparatuses. However, the conventional probe apparatus comprises a loader section for housing a plurality of objects to be measured and having a system for carrying the objects, and a measure section for measuring the objects. These loader and measure sections are paired to form the probe apparatus. When wafers of one kind must be quickly measured while concurrently measuring wafers of the other kind, therefore, there is nothing to do but wait until the measurement of 25 pieces of wafers of the other kind is finished by one probe apparatus, since a cassette which is carried to the probe apparatus contains 25 pieces of wafers as a unit. Or it must be arranged so that several pieces of wafers of the other kind are picked up from the cassette and that they are allotted to plural probe apparatuses to measure them. This requires many hands.
In order to solve this problem, a wafer supply means is used including loader sections or wafers supply and housing systems arranged right and left and before and behind a semiconductor wafer prober (preliminarily-opened Japanese Utility Model Application Sho 60-41045) and a probe apparatus including plural measurement stage systems to measure wafers, located relative to a loader section (preliminarily-opened Japanese Patent Application Sho 61-168236).
While a wafer is being measured at a measuring section, however, a next wafer must be carried to the other measuring section at the loader section in the above case. Therefore, vibration caused when the next wafer was carried at the loader section was transmitted to the wafer which was under measurement, thereby making it impossible to make accurate measurement of the water.
When plural loader and measuring sections were fixed in an independent box, the probe apparatus became large in size, thereby making it impossible for the large-sized apparatus to be quickly moved and rearranged in the clean room.
As shown in FIG. 2, the wafer was marked by a marking needle of the marking means through a hole in the center of the probe needle lines immediately after its measurement and according to its measuring results. According to this method, however, it sometimes happened that the marking means contacted and broke the probe needle and that IC chips on the wafer were damaged.
Although semiconductor chips were previously measured under normal temperature (25.degree. C.), it is currently a requirement that their electric characteristics be measured under high and, low temperatures.